Due to my professional life, I have been changing laptop roughly every 2 years. For about the last 6 years I have used Dell laptop machines. The newest I purchased is a Dell Vostro 1500, transitioning from a (way too old) Dell Latitude 600.

When changing computer there’s always a number of “new” things one must get used to, but so far there hadn’t been any significant “adjustment issue”, considering I stuck with Dell. Most of the adaptations needed were on the software side.

This time around however, a rather significant change has occurred, which is making my adjustment period longer and more painful. The keyboard layout has changed in what I’d call a radical way. This is causing a large amount of keystroke errors. Some are very bothersome, as I lose a lot of time first understanding what happened, then undoing or otherwise returning to the last known point before the keystroke error.

Another issue is the operation speed. I am operating the keyword at a much lower speed now (and, again, with many more errors per X amount of keystrokes), and I am not able to do it yet “blindly”.
 

The changes concerns important keys such as page up and down, delete, insert, home, end, backspace and return, all keys which I heavily used to quicken my interaction with various software UIs, and that I am inclined to believe are equally heavily used by anyone who works daily with a computer.

The screenshots below illustrate the different layouts (pics grabbed from the net, I am not able to find my camera’s charger at the moment):

Dell Latitude 600 (the pictures are really fro ma D620, but it’s the same layout)

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Dell Vostro 1500

What I find most disturbing is how the end and delete button are far apart, which makes for difficult manual repeat in long sequence, (like for example down arrow, end, delete), and the placement of the return key, which is not any longer at the edge, with the consequence that often enough  Ihit page up or page down instead of return and then I am surprised but the unexpected effect of my keystroke!

What’s worse, I am slowly adjusting to the new layout, And that should be great in itself. However, as I use still the old laptop (where I run windows for some necessary win packages and for some win testing), I am becoming confused also with that keyboard layout, as in any true transition period, so often enough when I men to hit return, I instead hit the apostrophe (single quote) key!

So, at the end of this, I wonder whether Dell has changed layout due to a conscious usability-improving strategy, one which, however, requires a long enough learning curve. While of course this is not a big deal, it is a small annoyance which prompted me to wonder.

I’ll also have to check which keyboard layout the other new Dell series have.

I am sorry about the not-so-good pictures, I will upgrade them as soon as I’ll be able to charge my camera again

Tags: complaints, Dell, keyboard layout